How do we begin implementing standardized work?
Funny you should ask me that. I've been struggling with the same question for years. I remember that, at one company, we asked an unfortunate lean practitioner to "write up the standards". He was (is) a good guy and read the books on what standards really look like – I strongly recommend the book "Toyota Talent", by Jeff Liker and David Meier – and then he produced a document called "work standards" for each workstation, complete, with photos and all. The poor guy stayed at it for almost two years and, like a complete idiot, I kept arguing that he should write everything down, since "it would all come in handy in due time". Anyway, he nearly had a stress breakdown and we never used all his hard work – I still feel sorry and ashamed about that episode (and this is one of the lucky cases where the recovered kid went on to do his job excellently afterwards).
After that embarrassing episode, awkward and ashamed, I tried to avoid the topic, but its inevitability kept popping up all the time. My sensei kept insisting, as you mentioned, that there can be no kaizen without standards. The good side of lean (or rather, the annoying side of lean) is that you don't choose your learning topics, so I took a breath and tried to step back to look at this topic differently. I've found that, when in doubt, with lean ideas that don't seem to work, start by putting yourself in the operators' shoes and looking through their eyes.
Eight Hours of Standardized Work
What can really ruin an operator's day? Whether on a shop floor or in any area of the company, picture the person you think is doing their very best every day and who gets yelled at by customers or blamed by their supervisor for doing a bad job. This is particularly painful because it is unfair (they give their all every day and are in difficult circumstances) and destabilizing because of the nagging doubt that they might actually be doing the job wrong. No amount of self-justification (I'm doing what I can) or rationalization (It can't be that bad) can make up for the anxiety created by the fear that your boss has a bad (or wrong) impression of you. This is very, very bad.
The other point that paralyzed me was one of my sensei's insistence that the supervisor's role was to give each operator eight hours of standardized work – not just work standards, but standardized work! I could never connect with this because in most work environments I know, from manufacturing to services, what supervisors actually do is move people from one station to another and tell them what to do and when, not how to do it, specifically how to do it within takt time and in the right sequence of motions. My sensei's points were that:
- An operator should only perform standardized work during his or her workday;
- The manager should give him/her eight hours of standardized work to perform;
- When the standardized work ran out, the person should stop working;
- Any non-standardized work should be examined and questioned:
- Is this work necessary?
- If so, should the operator be doing it?
His point was that management's responsibility was to progressively eliminate non-standardized work from the shop floor – a real challenge!
Another aspect of the puzzle was that in any Toyota plant in the world, the routine emphasis on on-the-job training is obvious, but here we are back to the conundrum. Since there are work standards for everything in the Toyota environment, TWI techniques can be applied – but what do you do when there are no standards? Back to the chicken-and-egg problem.
Well, having failed the first time by attacking the standards side of the puzzle, I wondered why not start from the other side. In the same factory where we had left a guy exhausted from writing work standards, we asked the supervisor to train operators every day – the rule was one day, one operator, 20 minutes of training. The supervisor did this with approximately thirty operators, which meant he would see each person for 20 minutes every two months and so on. We set up a visual plan on a whiteboard so that each operator could see when they would be trained.
At first, the supervisor tried to use the detailed work standards that had been compiled, but it simply didn't work. Either the operator was an experienced veteran who scoffed at the procedure, so it told him nothing he needed to know, or the operator was a newcomer and, therefore, the elaborate documents were far too detailed to be used in twenty minutes. Aaargh! After a few months, we decided to drop the documents and focus on the training relationship. The supervisor would have to work with pencil and paper to write on an A4 sheet (nothing more than an A4 – this became important) a checklist for doing the job correctly. In the end, this checklist came to include:
- The main steps for performing the job;
- OK versus not-OK descriptions at the key points;
- Safety reminders.
Which looks just like what a classic operations work standard sheet should look like! It turns out that during the twenty-minute discussions, the supervisor checked the main sequence with inexperienced operators and whether they understood the difficult parts, and refined the OK/not-OK descriptions with the veterans. To my utter surprise (and relief), binders of work standard sheets started appearing at the workstations (a high-mix environment) and many new technical kaizen opportunities began to emerge in standardized work discussions: the operator's actual movements in the cell: feet, hands and eyes.
Suddenly I find myself working in a company's service operation with staff who told maintenance technicians where to drive to repair what. After visualizing the first key indicators (trips with incorrect information, customer lead time, etc.), we started a training program in the same format. What we discovered is that contracts vary from customer to customer and it is incredibly difficult for staff to know exactly what is specific to each customer. So they began to establish standards by contract type, and now they find that they need to investigate more thoroughly with the same customer on the phone before sending a technician. In this case, they start with existing procedures and, with a twenty-minutes-a-day system, turn these general procedures into specific work standards.
In both cases, as described in "Toyota Talent", we discovered that a few key movements account for a large part of the work volume (in the maintenance case, three main parts make up 80% of the activities). So we set up a "dojo", a special area where technicians come back and are trained every day, not on special cases, but to become extremely good at what they do every day – with safety reminders at the workstation. With this system, staff can now have a regular technical discussion with one technician at a time – the kaizen wheel starts turning again. How far can we go with this? In an engineering company, the head of engineering started a row of black binders with checklists that he goes through in the same twenty minutes a day with the engineers he manages. These checklists range from OK/not-OK products to how to use CAD programs.
The Key to Standardized Work
The answer to your question, I now believe, lies not in standardized work itself, but in tasking managers with increasing operators' confidence in their own OK/not-OK judgments. More than a decade ago, while I was trying to understand the engineering side of lean, I was repeatedly struck by Toyota veterans' insistence that no solution should be sought for problems unless the test method for that solution had been formulated first. It took me more than 10 years to see how this can be operationalized at the work level, but I am now confident that the relationship between supervisor and staff member is the key to establishing standardized work.
As for kaizen, well, surprisingly, in the workplaces I now know that use this approach of constantly training to standard (and the continuous evolution of standard documents as tools to support the operator's OK/not-OK judgment), kaizen topics have changed in nature and are less process-driven and more technically focused. As a result, kaizen is much richer in know-how lessons. Improvements are more people-centered and less organization-centered, and, looking back, have a much wider range of impacts on the work, products and customer satisfaction.
I don't know if this helps in your specific situation, since it can be a hard sell – it radically changes the nature of supervisory work. In my case, I'm very lucky to work with companies' senior management, so when they are convinced, things tend to happen. In any case, keep in mind that although such a change in approach is clearly beneficial to operators, it is also a huge challenge for frontline management, and they need serious help to achieve it. On the other hand, this approach can unlock the most unlikely environments. A senior manager I met at the Post Office began systematically asking for "dojos" in his area, and the results have been spectacular, with thousands of "dojos" running and dazzling employee satisfaction figures. In this specific case, they formulated the purpose of their lean approach as "supporting professional gestures". Wow.
